Mark Follman

Two months after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, America is embroiled in a fierce debate about guns. But apart from a few shell-shocked comments to news media, most Americans have not heard directly from those whose voices may matter most—parents of the deceased children, and educators, first responders, and doctors who confronted the horror that day. On January 30 at Newtown High School, the devastated community testified for six hours before Connecticut leaders. A mother explaining what her surviving daughter endured. An EMT describing the damage inflicted by a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle. An ER doctor pleading to tell his patients about the health risks of guns. A father recalling "the longest two hours of my life." Here we've assembled a short compilation of powerful moments from the hearing:

Video footage courtesy of Connecticut Network; see the full hearing here. Also visit our ongoing Letters to Newtown project, and read our full investigation into gun laws and mass shootings in America.

Testimonials, in order of appearance in the compilation:

• Nicole and Ian Hockley, parents of Sandy Hook victim Dylan Hockley
• David Wheeler, father of Sandy Hook victim Benjamin Wheeler
• Peter Paradis, stepfather of Sandy Hook teacher's aide and victim Rachel D'Avino
• Neil Heslin, father of Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis
• Scarlett Lewis, mother of Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis
• Susan Ehrens, mother of Sandy Hook survivor Emma Ehrens
• Dan O'Donnell, Sandy Hook parent
• Laurie Veillette, volunteer EMT for Newtown Volunteer Ambulance Corps
• Douglas Fuchs, police chief of Redding, Connecticut
• Mary Ann Jacob, library clerk at Sandy Hook
• Dr. William Begg, emergency room physician at Danbury Hospital and Newtown resident
• Tom Swetts, teacher at Newtown High School
• Darren Wagner, former police officer and father of a Newtown High School student

Research and additional production by Sydney Brownstone and Maggie Severns.

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Gina Jacobs / Shutterstock

After a Colorado movie theater was hit with ghastly gun violence last July, one of the first things we did at Mother Jones was contact a top expert on mass murder, hoping he could help answer some questions. Was this disturbingly familiar event occurring more often? What kind of people carried out these killings and with what weapons? And why had no academic, journalist, or policy thinker gathered in-depth data on this recurring problem in more than a decade?

Part of the challenge, criminologist James Alan Fox confirmed, was that no clear definition for "mass shooting" exists. Fox himself has worked with broad criteria, using statistics from the FBI on crimes involving four or more fatalities (not including the perpetrator). With this approach he has concluded that mass shootings in the US have fluctuated since the mid 1970s, averaging about 20 per year with no clear trend up or down.

But Fox's conclusion relies on the raw numbers of total incidents and deaths in all manner of crimes, including those with clear motives such as gang killings, armed robberies, and domestic violence. For our investigation, we settled on narrower criteria excluding such crimes, as Fox noted in his recent criticism of our work. Our goal was to dig deeper into the phenomenon of seemingly incomprehensible attacks in public places—shopping malls, religious buildings, workplaces, schools—to try to make more sense of these "senseless" tragedies.

[Read the full article]

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